Church Growth or Corps Growth?
One of the core tenets of modern church growth theory is that the Sunday morning worship service is the centerpiece of the church, the “golden hour,” and the main attraction for newcomers. According to this theory, the best way to grow a church is to put on a great service featuring a gifted preacher, professional caliber worship music, and the technical production levels of a Broadway theater. Some of you may have experienced these kinds of services when attending conferences at well-known megachurches like Saddleback, Willow Creek, or North Point.
Despite their numerical success, however, churches built on this model have struggled to get their attendees to take the next steps in their faith and service journeys. I witnessed this firsthand in the large churches I attended during my time away from the Army (1995-2010). Newcomers were attracted to the Sunday services, but attending was often the limit of their commitment. Recruiting Sunday school teachers, small group leaders, mission team members, or interesting anyone in going deeper spiritually was like pulling teeth because the churches had attracted them with one thing and were now asking them to do something else.
With this in mind, I don’t think trying to compete with large churches on Sunday morning is the smart way to grow our corps. For one thing, giant churches filled with “spectators” who don’t even know their pastor isn’t something you’ll find in the New Testament Church, which was essentially a house church movement. Second, let’s be honest, we can’t compete with large churches when it comes to having Billy Graham in the pulpit, professional-level music, and high-end technical production (although we have many excellent preachers in the Army, and we punch way above our weight musically as well). Third, our worship style is, shall we say, distinctive because it’s aimed at those actively involved in the mission of the Army. For those on-mission it fits like a glove, but it’s not every newcomer’s cup of tea (to mix metaphors), especially if they don’t know anyone in the congregation. Finally, our Salvationist DNA is faith in action. The last thing we need is a Sunday service filled with folks who don’t want to help carry out our mission.
For all these reasons, plus the fact that a corps is more than just a church, I think we should turn the church growth model on its head. Rather than trying to attract people to our Sunday morning service and then asking them to serve, let’s first ask them to help us serve our communities through our programs and ministries, and then invite them to our Sunday worship. Think about all the volunteers, donors, building renters, clients, kids and their parents, and everyone else we come in contact with in the course of just being The Salvation Army. Many of these people are already serving in some way and so are self-selected excellent candidates for eventual soldiership.
After serving beside our corps congregations, our “recruits” will be more responsive to the invitation to join us on Sundays because they already know us. And our worship will then be more meaningful to them because they are already on-mission in a sense. One of the advantages of our small congregations is that newcomers can know everyone, including the pastor. It’s a subtle but important difference in emphasis. Rather than thinking of ourselves as a worshipping community that serves, we should think of ourselves as a “community in mission” (Commissioner Phil Needham’s term) that worships together.
I’ve seen this sequence of events play out many times over the years in my little corner of Army ministry. We invite a brass musician from the community to play on Christmas kettles, or to sit in one of our weeknight band rehearsals, or to give a couple of kids a lesson each week, and the next thing you know they are attending on Sunday morning, playing in the band, and eventually becoming soldiers and local officers. One such new soldier is playing in my corps band right now. Another is now a corps officer in the Western Territory! The analogy I often use is that the first day of classes in a new school is a lot less daunting if you’ve already been practicing with the football team or the marching band for a month because you already have a group of friends before school starts. The same is true of the first Sunday morning in the corps for newcomers who have already served with us.
None of the above is to say the quality of our Sunday worship isn’t important, or that we shouldn’t welcome newcomers on Sunday morning. We should strive to do everything with excellence, especially when it comes to worshipping our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, who deserves nothing less than our best. And we don’t have to choose between worship and service. We can do both well. But our strong point, and I think our main attraction to newcomers, is that our congregations are doers of the Word and not hearers only (or should be), as the Bible admonishes us to be. So, we won’t have to convince our newcomers to get out of the pew and serve because serving is how they came to us in the first place. That’s the difference between church growth and corps growth.